Marching to His Tune

What would the Fourth of July be without hot dogs, fireworks and marches by John Philip Sousa? Everyone knows them, hums along to them and taps their feet to their infectious rhythms. But for many people, Sousa remains only a name.

Few realize that before Gershwin, Copland or Bernstein, it was Sousa who put American musical efforts on the map at a time when they were regarded as poor cousins to European music. And even though Sousa’s musical legacy remains incredibly popular, his work is much more sophisticated and well-crafted than most people realize, and he pioneered a now hallowed tradition in jazz music.

The man who never let a band play one of his marches the same way twice deserves to be called great, say historians and bandmasters.

What did Sousa do? He educated the American

public, invented his own concert format and even got wealthy in the process.

Moreover, Sousa’s band members went on to school generations of children as they went on to head up high school and college music departments across the United States.

Each remained true to his legacy because the grand old man himself, who performed in a tightly buttoned uniform with immaculate white gloves, trim beard and gracious manner of conducting, inspired incredible dedication from them. He consistently treated them with dignity and respect.

“He was Mr. Big around the turn of the century,” Sousa biographer Paul E. Bierley said. “He was the most popular composer in the world, and the richest too.”

Sousa’s musical output includes 136 marches, classics such as “The Stars and Stripes Forever” (made the national march by an act of Congress in 1987), “Semper Fidelis” and “The Washington Post,” composed to promote an essay contest that newspaper was sponsoring.

He also wrote 15 stage works (his 1885 “El Capitan” was the first American operetta to succeed on Broadway), 70 songs and 332 arrangements and transcriptions. Add to that three novels, an autobiography and more than 100 magazine articles.

His impact on American music cannot be underestimated, Bierley and others said.

“In the 40 years of his band’s existence, they played well over 15,000 concerts,” Bierley said. “For comparison, ask the Los Angeles Philharmonic how many concerts they’ve played in 40 years.”

The answer: 5,840, according to an orchestra spokeswoman.

The man destined to become the embodiment of American music was born to immigrant parents in Washington, D.C., in 1854. His father, John Antonio Sousa, was born in Spain, of Portuguese descent, who moved to the U.S., where he became a trombonist in the U.S. Marine Band. His mother, Maria Elisabeth Trinkhaus, was born in Bavaria.

A precocious, self-confident and determined child, Sousa demonstrated perfect pitch at the age of 6, when he began studying voice, violin, piano, flute, cornet and trombone, as well as baritone and alto horns. Because of his father, he grew up around military band music at the time of the Civil War.

He led his own band when he was 12; the next oldest member was 27.

At 13, Sousa tried to run away to join a circus band. Instead, his father enlisted him as a boy musician in the Marines, not uncommon in those days. He became and remained a Marine until he was 19, attaining the rank of warrant officer.

In 1875, he began playing violin, touring and eventually directing theater orchestras, conducting Gilbert and Sullivan’s “H.M.S. Pinafore” on Broadway that year.

He married Jane van Middlesworth Bellis, an understudy singer he had met during “Pinafore” rehearsals, on Dec. 30, 1879. None of their three children became musicians.

In 1880, he returned to the U.S. Marine Band, this time at its helm, where he presided for a dozen years. But in 1892, promoter David Blakely persuaded him to leave and form a civilian concert band.

Their first concert took place in 1892 in Plainfield, N.J. Over the next 38 years, no band was more popular in the United States, playing to sold-out houses. The band was equally popular in its four tours to Europe in the early 1900s.

“His musicians, believe me, would have followed him to the end of the Earth,” Bierley said. “He treated them with such great respect. He never raised his voice in a rehearsal. If anyone made a mistake, he didn’t say anything about it except, ‘Let’s go over it again.’ ”

Sousa was less interested in perfection than in getting a particular tone.

“The thing he insisted on more than anything else was a mellow sound from the clarinets,” Bierley said. “Once he spent an entire morning on just the clarinet section. He finally got the lead clarinet to play the way he wanted. Then he got the others to play like that. It became a tradition carried on for nearly 40 years.”

Sousa wrote music whenever he could.

“He composed without the aid of a musical instrument,” Bierley said. “He just wrote on paper what he heard in his head. He always carried music paper. If he got an idea, he would write it down and develop it later when he had more time.”

During World War I, Sousa joined the U.S. Naval Reserve at the age of 62. He received the rank of lieutenant and was paid $1 a month.

Sousa died in 1932 at the age of 77, after conducting a rehearsal of the Ringgold Band in Reading, Pa. The very last piece he conducted there was “The Stars and Stripes Forever.” He died later that day in his room at the Abraham Lincoln Hotel in Reading.

“I was intrigued by the titles he gave his music, all very colorful titles,” said Bierley, originally an aeronautical engineer who became fascinated by Sousa in 1963. “I wondered where they came from.”

Bierley decided to answer the questions himself, and has written four books on Sousa, with three more planned. He wrote the article on Sousa in the definitive Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, and he also edited the composer and bandmaster’s autobiography.

“It took me 30 years to work up the courage to do that.”

It was a passage in Bierley’s biography of Sousa that inspired conductor Keith Brion, then director of the band at Yale University in New Haven, Conn., to emulate a Sousa concert.

“It started out just as a lark . . . sort of a time-machine idea,” Brion said. “Dress up the Yale Band like it was Sousa’s band. I would dress up as Sousa, and see what happened. This was in January of 1978, 20 years ago.”

That led to a full-time career for Brion and his New Sousa Band, which performs in the U.S. and abroad.

“He was the center of one kind of musical life in this country for something like 40 years,” Brion said. “Sousa was so brilliant at what he did. His legacy is enormous. I can knock around in it for the rest of my life.”

What many people don’t know is that Sousa changed the works during performances, said Ralph P. Locke, professor of musicology at the Eastman School of Music at the University of Rochester, N.Y.

“Sousa would wave at the clarinets to tell them not to double the trumpets on the tune the next time around, or vice versa, and then he would bring everybody in for a rousing finish,” Locke said.

It was in this way that Sousa never played a march the same way twice.

“Sousa is one of those composers who are easy to dismiss because their music seems so lightweight, but actually it is beautifully crafted, and for that reason it neverloses its audience appeal,” Locke said, comparing the bandmaster favorably to American icons such as George Gershwin and Duke Ellington.

“Sousa’s music is much more sophisticated than people think,” said Sousa imitator Brion. “In the introduction of ‘The Stars and Stripes Forever,’ each measure is a quotation from a different part of the march. It’s a tip-off of what’s to happen. His music is riddled with this kind of thing. He never wrote an introduction until the march was completed.”

“The Stars and Stripes Forever,” which a homesick Sousa wrote aboard ship returning from a European tour, was declared the national march in 1987, after 15 previous efforts had failed.

This May, Sousa was inducted into the first American Classical Music Hall of Fame ceremony in Cincinnati, along with luminaries such as Aaron Copland, Igor Stravinsky, Leontyne Price, Ellington and about 20 other musicians, composers and singers. The U.S. Marine Band, founded in 1798, was included as “America’s oldest professional music organization.”

In the years since Sousa’s death, touring bands have largely become a thing of the past.

“None of the professional bands lived long after the advent of radio,” said biographer Bierley. “They made attempts. Sousa’s band tours kept getting shorter and shorter. The last one was in 1931. He died in March 1932.”

To the end, Sousa saw himself as promoting his homeland.

Said Bierley: “If people asked the old boy what he was about, he’d say, ‘I’m a salesman of Americanism.’ That was his pat answer. That pretty much sums it up.

“When he came along, American music was pretty much a stepchild to anything European. He was sensitive to that. He was proud to be an American. He expressed his love of country and patriotism in a more profound way than any musician who ever lived, anywhere, in any era.”